nromdotcom
Broadly speaking it sounds a bit like Antitrust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_(film)
But I haven’t seen it in quite a while so I’m not sure how well specifics line up.
Over the years, I’ve become one to keep my media use as legit as possible. No judgement on anyone who doesn’t, but for a variety of reasons I have chosen to.
For retro games, that means my process is:
- Evercade - I’m a huge fan of the Evercade ecosystem and if a game is available there I will play it there first.
- NSO - For games not available on Evercade, my next stop will be Switch Online.
- Collections - If a game isn’t available on NSO, I’ll see if it’s available via a collection. Think Castlevania Collections, Arcade Archives, Namco Museums, etc. For these I’ll typically check reviews before picking it up and make sure the games play well as that’s not always a guarantee.
- Unlicensed emulation - Only at that point will I fire up a game on my raspberry pi.
Though honestly I can’t really be bothered to tinker with shit as much anymore these days, so often (but not always) by the time I arrive at unlicensed emulation as the solution I’ll just decide to play something else instead.
Continuing to work my way through the Duke Nukem 1+2 Remasters on Evercade. So much love went into these its ridiculous.
I think regardless of that deal, they were already on the debt-go-round for long enough it would’ve caught up to them eventually. I can’t imagine this was gonna be “one last job then we go clean.” The market would continue to demand more and faster growth until they hit the wall one way or the other.
Seriously. I realize people have Feelings about DRM and always-online stuff, but this is an article about a game that was never especially popular or active entering maintenance mode after a couple of years.
They aren’t shutting it down, they aren’t making it unplayable (though of course either of those things could happen at any time etc etc) - they just are no longer producing content for a game almost no one is playing anymore anyway.
Certainly I’m not suggesting that IT-related majors should be removed from universities or anything like that. Just that the main path into the industry shouldn’t cost dozens of thousands of dollars and take several years of an adult’s life.
We’ve already got all of these other, cheaper, faster paths into the industry. What if they were better? What if they were more popular? More available? How would that change the industry? Change society?
You seem to suggest it would be a bad thing (or maybe I’m misunderstanding), can you expand upon on that? I’m not sure I’m following.
Are you saying entry level positions will be monopolized by recent high school grads and no one else will be able to get jobs? If so, are they currently monopolized by recent boot camp grads? Recent college grads? Is one necessarily better than the other? Or necessarily worse?
Does a kid graduating from a trade school and scoring a job on a help desk, studying on the job for a CCNA, and moving onto the network engineering team take any food out of the mouth of the slightly older kid graduating with a CS degree and starting a job at the same company they did their internship? What about the 35 year old tired of working at the mailroom of a law firm who signs up for a bootcamp where a contracting company will pay them for the duration of the training and place them in a job with one of their clients for one year?
I agree that an apprentice working with a single “master” probably wouldn’t work very well. But I’m also not sure how frequently other apprenticeships still operate on that model. Perhaps it’s more common for other trades due to a preponderance of independent contractors, but there’s no saying that the apprentice needs to be beholden to one individual “master.”
You’re right, you’re probably not gonna go from rando 18 year old who has only ever used an iPhone for their computing needs to even someone who can do even the “college intern” grunt work of a software dev team.
The typical on-ramp in our industry for someone like that is to come up through the help desk or data center where you do get to pull wires, carry supplies, rack and stack, manage inventory, etc. And probably this is where many apprenticeships would begin, too, if the person had literally no prerequisite knowledge.
But the bootcamp system to create devs directly is also fine. I’d just love to see more worker-oriented structure around it so we don’t have cheapass bootcamps flooding the job market with people that perhaps have the bare minimum skills and only on paper. Or predatory bootcamps locking people into jobs at shitty companies that teach them awful ways of working that their next company has to undo.
It really, really, really doesn’t take a 4 year Computer Science degree from a university to work a typical software engineer job. I’ve worked with folks with no college education, history degrees, electrical engineering degrees, etc. Folks that have come up through the help desk, through the data center, through bootcamps, etc.
Let’s make that even easier to do.
Well maybe you couldn’t, but that doesn’t mean there’s no way to set up appropriate technical instruction infrastructure as part of a union or guild through which this apprenticeship would go. Or even that one doesn’t already exist.
Often, a plumbing or electrical apprentice will come up through a technical high school. Either a technical high school or a technicial continuing education program at a community college, say.
Heck my local technical high school offers an “Information Technology” vocational program that sounds an awful lot like that program I went through in college. Wouldn’t it have been great to save 4 years and countless dollars?
For programming jobs, this gap is currently mostly filled with “bootcamps.” Increasingly you’ll find bootcamp programs that are free but garnish your salary for some time after you’ve been placed in a job, or the bootcamp is run by a company directly and you get paid to go through the bootcamp after signing a contract saying you’ll work for them for a year or two afterward or else need to pay back the price of the program.
These can vary from “pretty good, actually” to “predatory” to “a little bit like indentured servitude.” Wouldn’t it be great if there were a union or guild around these practices? Or to encourage more kids to enter trade schools that offer vocational programs they’re interested in?
